GM on track to become world’s No. 1 automaker?

GM sales are driven by continued strong demand for the company’s lineup of fuel-efficient cars and crossovers. Year-to-date through July, retail sales for GM’s passenger cars are up 37 percent, led by the Chevrolet Cruze. Year-to-date through July, retail sales of GM’s crossovers increased 25 percent, led by the Chevy Equinox (shown) and GMC Terrain. PHOTO COURTESY OF GM

It has been just over two years since GM filed for bankruptcy protection, and Motor Matters columnist Bill Visnic believes it’s “almost certain” the automaker will recapture the role of the world’s No. 1 automaker.

The following are excerpts from Visnic’s story:

Many were certain GM would never regain the crown as the globe’s largest-selling automaker; many also believed Toyota might never relinquish it. But after adding up the global sales numbers from the first half of the year, GM has shoved so far past Toyota that it’s a virtually insurmountable lead. The Bloomberg news service reported GM had worldwide auto sales of 4.5 million in the first six months of the year, compared with Toyota’s 3.7 million sales worldwide. What’s more, Germany’s ambitious Volkswagen Group posted slightly more than 4.1 million first-half sales to also shoulder past Toyota.

Nobody expected GM to explode from bankruptcy with such a flourish, nor could anybody have predicted the March 11 magnitude-9 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that hammered Japan and for several weeks shut down much of its industrial output, both in Japan and abroad. Toyota and the other major Japanese automakers only now are returning their worldwide manufacturing operations to normalized levels, and the months of curtailed production has done as much as GM’s revitalization to guarantee Toyota will surrender the No. 1 role to GM this year.

You might wonder how Japan’s disaster could impact Toyota so heavily, when 72 percent of the vehicles it sells in North America are made here. But the real impact of the disaster was on the Japanese auto industry’s suppliers, most of which make components for vehicles Toyota assembles everywhere around the world. Currently, about 40 percent of the vehicles Toyota makes are manufactured outside of Japan, and the company recently said the Japan disaster would cause a global manufacturing shortfall of 800,000 vehicles in the April-to-September timeframe. Overlay that onto GM’s roughly half-million lead in sales for the first half of 2011 and it’s easy to how GM built such a lead.

Considering the still-sputtering U.S. economy, plus the fact a former General Motors CEO said American customers would never buy a car from an auto company that declared bankruptcy, it’s a fairy-tale turnaround — one that will be all the more magical for GM if it returns to its longtime role as the world’s No. 1 automaker at the end of this year.